Friday, May 18, 2012

“At first, God gave the
judgement of death upon man, when he should transgresse, absolutely, Morte
morieris, Thou shalt surely dye: The woman in her Dialogue with the
Serpent, she mollifies it, Ne fortè moriamur, perchance, if we eate, we
may die; and then the Devill is as peremptory on the other side, Nequaquam
moriemini, do what you will, surely you shall not die; And now God in this
Text comes to his reply, Quis est homo, shall they not die? Give me but
one instance, but one exception to this rule, What man is hee that liveth,
and shall not see death? Let no man, no woman, no devill offer a Ne
fortè, (perchance we may dye) much lesse a Nequaquam, (surely we
shall not dye) except he be provided of an answer to this question, except he
can give an instance against this generall, except he can produce that mans
name, and history, that hath lived, and shall not see death. Wee are all
conceived in close Prison; in our Mothers wombes, we are close Prisoners all;
when we are borne, we are borne but to the liberty of the house; Prisoners
still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to
the place of Execution, to death.”

And so Donna Summer has
not gone out to the place of Execution, trailing behind her my early twenties
in Shreveport, Louisiana. But I’m going to take the serpent’s side of the
argument, here. Whatever it was we ate (or sniffed, or smoked) back then, it
made more sense to think Nequaquam moriemini than to think God would
strike us down for discovering the toy store of our own bodies, since it was
the demiurge that had stocked it. And this was a discovery that required a
certain toy music. It was a delicate kind of thing, this music, as certainly
really good toy’s are: containing just that small bit of unheimlichkeit which
inhabits the doll, the clown, and the windup figure, reminiscent of that
infantile moment when the line is blurred between what is living and what
isn’t, when the categories aren’t fixed and the dreams aren’t quite captured
and pent by the circle made by sleep. The Giorgio Moroder thump and the old
Phil Spector echo effect made a space for a certain kind of voice, one that
varied the diva aspiration to filling the song: this voice emptied it.

At the time, I had begun
living in one of those classic small Southern towns where the old Dixie
hierarchies still gamely held, and in holding distorted themselves into all
kind of grotesqueness. Shreveport was like a weird combination of a Walker
Percy novel and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It was a perfect
outpost, actually, to watch the American system warp. And the perfect outpost
within that outpost was the Florentine club, until it was finally blown up. Or
so I heard. It was a combination disco and gay bar, and gay bars in the
backwater South tend to be under attack, especially in 1979.

I don’t think any
American craze has been hated quite as much as disco, for it combined all the
unpleasant reminders that the old American verities (which went all the way
baaaackbaaack baaack to … 1945) were
disconnected from reality: blue collar masculinity was a joke (prefigured by
YMCA, and instantiated in the 80s by a leveraged buyout culture and a political
leadership that had the knives out for the unions); heterosexuality was a joke;
and not only had the doors of perception been kicked open by drugs, but we had
all been unceremoniously hustled through them by an increasingly ominipotent
media and ‘information economy’ (that produces anything but information that
you, well, actually need), so that by this time it was already apparent that a
rose was not a rose and not a rose – at best, it was a prop to be photographed
for an advertisement to get you to buy a rose. As for American might – disco
seemed not so much to criticize it, like the New Left in the 60s, as to ignore
it, as though it didn’t exist at all. And if America wasn’t mighty, what was
it?

Well, one answer was
that it was place to get high on whatever was at hand, dance, and fuck, as much
as possible. Hot stuff baby this evening.

Myself, I’ve always been
more the bold boy in my head than out of it. I confined myself mostly to
dancing. I was first taken to the Florentine by Dean, one of the first people
who befriended me at the college I began attending in Shreveport. Dean had a
major crush on me – which was not as flattering as it seems, since Dean
eventually had a major crush on every straight guy that he met. But I owe him
the trip to the Florentine, because after Dean, I began to go there, almost
every night, with Cathy. We were both touched by some faint 70s version of the
St.Vitus mania, and it played itself out under Rick James’ Superfreak, the
Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight, and every word that fell from the mouth of
La Donna S.

This account rather
compresses the dance years in one way: it was actually Dyretta who taught me,
in as much as I am teachable in this department, to dance. Dyretta, much to her
regret, could not drain that thing in me that irresistibly went to the freak –
as Dyretta said, the white boy’s dance. The old Adam, here, try as he would,
could not change for the New Eve. But she did her best to introduce me to what
was up, and I responded in kind: she turned me on to the Sugar Hill gang, and I
gave her, for her birthday, the Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot. A wholly
satisfactory exchange.

The dance years finally
came to an end when I went for a year to France, to study in Montpellier. They
were succeeded, in the 80s, by the much different Talking Heads years, and New
Orleans. And Donna Summer’s voice is not one I listen to very much anymore. But
I am sad, sad, sad that she is dead. She crowned a better decade.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

GHARIB: As you know, there is a lot
of anxiety out there that the financial crisis is not over, that there is
another shoe to drop. What is the next big thing you are worried about in terms
of credit quality?

DIMON: We go through this
every five or six years and you can just go back in history. They are always a
little bit different. But there are a lot of commonalities: Fear, specter of
recession, credit assets, re-price, spreads re-price, etcetera. You`ve seen
sub-prime, SIV, CDOs, CLOs (ph) and now it is monolines, municipals, wraps. But
at the end of the day, those things will resolve and our system has resolved a
lot of them. A lot has been de-leveraged. A lot has been paid off. A lot of
problems have popped up are now gone. It`s not over yet, but you know, I would
be surprised if the financial part of this isn`t over by the end of the year.

- February 14, 2008

In
Matthew Josephson’s amusing history, The Robber Barons, there is a nice story
about the young J.P. Morgan. After having done what any man on the move would
do in 1861 – payinga substitute to
fight for him in the Union army – Young Morgan looked about him for
opportunities. One of the knocked on his door, in the person of Simon Stevens.
Stevens had stumbled onto a deal, by which he could buy 5,000 Hall carbines and
sell them to the Union Army of the West, with which he had a contract. The
beauty of the deal was that the carbines had been rejected by the government in
Washington on account of the fact that they were defective – when used, they
tended to explode, taking the thumb of the shooting soldier with them. “The quartermaster at Washington sold them for
$3.50 apiece. “The government had sold one day for $17,486 arms which it had
agreed the day before to purchase for $109,912,” comments the historian
Gustavus Myers. That young Morgan knew of this situation is plain from the fact
that after repudiation of the consignment of guns by General Fremont’s
division, he bluntly presented his claim not for the money he had advanced, but
for all of $58,175, half of the shipment having been already paid for in good
faith.”

Thus beganthe Morgan tradition of
advancing money for products that tend to blow up in the users hands. Evolution
and human kindness being what it is, the products are now called credit swaps.
But the object is always the same: a quick buck, made with the poker face of
propriety, and the compliance of a corrupt government.

Matthew Josephson and, for that matter,
Gustavus Meyers, are dead. And so is critical business journalism. In
the shitstorm about Morgan’s 3 billion dollars and counting losses from the
desk of its London Whale, the NYT business page has been an exemplary mix of
rather shocking news (once again, a big bank decides to make the big bucks by
doing socially negative betting, gets dick handed to it on plate) and
asskissing – since it seems to be obligatory that every story tell us that
Jamie Dimon is some financial wizard, a brilliant CEO who led Morgan unscathed
through the financial collapse.

The story is, of course, a crock. According to Table 8
(Borrowing Aggregated by Parent Company and Includes Sponsored ABCP Conduits)
of the GAO report on the Federal Reserve’s Emergency Loan Program (a series of
programs that lentmoney at 1 percent
or below), JP Morgan borrowed 391 billion dollars, making it the twelfth
largest borrower. Now admittedly, in today’s dazzling new world of free funds
for the wealthy, 391 billion dollars is peanuts. A quick and dirty guestimate
of what that means? If in that climate Morgan had borrowed that much money at 6
percent, the interest would have come to 21 600 000 000.
At 1 percent, the interest came to 3 600 000 000.
Granted, these were loans that had very brief time periods – which meant,
essentially, the Fed was giving the bank billions to play with, but pretending
that the loan was not for a year, but for a day, a week, etc. Still, I don’t
think making money when the government essentially hands you 18 billion dollars
is that difficult. I think even I could do it. I’d like at least to try. Please
Uncle Sam?

But here’s the fix: you will never, ever read areport in the NYT that quotes the GAO
report. The 16 trillion dollar loan jamboree held for the richest by the
richest is a non-event in American journalism. Whereas certain events – such as
Kim Kardashian’s weight and sexual life – are known in microscopic detail, down
to the last tooth on the zipper of her K-Dash skirt – other events in America
are too shocking for the eyes of the public. The continual and vast state
support for the richest are super secret.

Thus, Roger Loewenstein, who used to be a good journalist,
wrote a sycophantic piece about Dimon in the NYT two years ago that included
grafs like this:

“The popular animus has come as a shock to Dimon. Recently, while
entertaining a roomful of corporate clients over a tenderloin dinner, he felt
the need to assert his and his industry’s worthiness. “I am not embarrassed to
be a banker,” he noted. “I am not embarrassed to be in business.” In truth,
Dimon has plenty not to be embarrassed about. He fulfilled a banker’s first
obligation: he made sure his bank survived. This was thanks to his strategy of
maintaining a healthy cushion of capital for a rainy day. When markets melted
down and the economy plunged into recession, J. P. Morgan remained
not only solvent but profitable every quarter. When other banks were refusing to
lend, Dimon’s continued to offer credit to customers ranging from homeowners to
Pfizer to the State of California.
And when the United States needed a strong institution to bail out a failing
bank, it turned — twice — to JPMorgan Chase.
Dimon sees himself as a patriotic citizen who helped his country in a time
of crisis. Now the most visible face of Wall Street, he thinks banks and
bankers have a role not only in rebuilding the economy but in coming up with
remedies for the financial system. Critics say that, as a part — even a solvent
part — of a failed system, he should be grateful for the government’s assistance
rather than stridently critical, as he has been, of some of its reforms. Dimon,
they note, took advantage of the crisis to acquire Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, and
J. P. Morgan emerged from the crisis as a vastly larger institution. That is a
cause for alarm to 33 U.S. senators, who voted this spring for an amendment
that would have forced big banks to dismantle. The country is deeply divided
over the proper role, and the size, of banks, and nothing epitomizes these
tensions quite like the narrative of Jamie Dimon.”
I especially like describing the takeover of WashMu as a patriotic act,
instead of an act of typical elite gouging, in the spirit of those Hall
Carbines of the Civil War era. JP’s spirit was doubtless pleased. Love of one’s
country never felt so good.
So: read the news, and remember that there is nothing more tinpot than a
reputation on Wall Street – except perhaps one on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Ah, the blood pressure read of the day is the article about the pregnant
women tasered for refusing to sign her traffic ticket. A beautiful
story of moral idiocy, state power overreach, and what happens when you
fill the courts with idiot judges.

This article is a regular mine for the satirist who lives away from the
home of the free. There's the idea that tasering is a “a useful pain
technique,” rather than a useless one - both of which are beloved by our
boys in blue!

There's the quote from the 10th district judgem
Alex Kozinski, a real prize from the Reagan era, who said, of the three
cops who tasered a pregant woman for not signing her traffic ticket for
going 12 miles above the speed limit in a school zone: “They deserve
our praise, not the opprobrium of being declared constitutional
violators. The City of Seattle should award them commendations for grace
under fire.”

Of course, the clever satirist can not only
delight in Judge Kozinki faschisty-moronic sense of who the City of
Seattle should honor and what 'under fire' means, but can dig deeper
into his recent history and - strike gold! Here's what our Kozinski
does in his spare time (Wiki quote):

"In 2008, according to The
Los Angeles Times, Kozinski "maintained a publicly accessible website
featuring sexually explicit photos and videos."[5] In response, Kozinski
called for an ethics investigation of himself.[6] In July 2009,
Kozinski was admonished by a panel headed by Judge Anthony
Scirica.[7][8]"

Surely Scirica could have asked for some pain control in this case.

Another judge, however, deserves a pitying look - pitying because
obviously, competing with Kozinski for the moron accolade is difficult:

Another dissenter, Judge Barry G. Silverman, said “tasing was a humane way to force Brooks out of her car.”

“There are only so many ways a person can be extracted from a vehicle
against her will, and none of them is pretty,” he explained. “Fists,
batons, chokeholds, tear gas and chemical spray all carry their own
risks to suspects and officers alike.”

This woman had to go to
the bathroom. One of the ways of extracting said person would be to wait
fifteen minutes. Of course, you could also explain why she needed to
sign the ticket, and even encouraged, as one helpful NYT commentor
observed, to write, My signature to this ticket in no way acknowledges
my guilt. But why do that? She 's black, she's pregnant, she's
taserable.Times a wastin'. And there's this controlled pain technique
that the cops are just itching to use on a pregant women. It will be,
well, scientific good fun! Meanwhile, the elderly judges, like some
grotesque George Grosz tableau, will clap their bony hands together, or
get bony in other parts of the body (after which, of course, they will
investigate themselves), at the creamy dreamy thought of the boys in
blue bein'... boys.

A good case for the current Supreme Court
to extend the "fan club for police" ideas that have had a long, long
tradition there, since the days when the drug war demanded that we toss
aside any of those frivolous protections to our privacy, property, and
dignity in order to allow the state to claim your endocrine system as
its property. Tasing, keeping prisoners in solitary for forty years, and
the general torture machine of the American penitentiary system have
long been kept going by the creepy people who inhabit the upper reaches
of the judiciary.

Which is why I, a lefty, was totally down
with Newt Gingrich's suggestion that the Supreme Court be subordinated
to Congress. In fact, I think the Supreme Court should simply be
abolished. I don't see the need for it.

Monday, May 14, 2012

The golden age of psychometrics extended from
the first measurements of current in the nerves, effected by Helmholtz, and the
first attempt to measure the time of sensation, which was performed by
Helmholtz’s student, Sigmund Exner, up to the Pavlovian era of the conditioned
reflex in the 20s. It was a mad scramble of different instruments all employed
to make psychology a science of the smallest interval – the measure of the
thought, the nerve impulse, the present of seeing, hearing, and touching. He
who says science says measurement – such was the law and the prophets in the 19th
century – and under this law, psychology seemed, by its very object, to be
excluded – since psychological states seem preeminently qualitative. But
instrument by instrument (the myrograph! the Weber compass! The kymograph!), a
physiological route to psychological states was carved out. If the object of
psychology was not the qualitative state, but the quantitative reflex arc, then
psychology could finally be legitimated as something more than a mishmash of
post-humoral speculations, for it would have found its total material correlate.

By the 1860s, some advances had been made in
the instrumentation and measurement of current in the nerves in relation to
stimulus. Helmholtz had determined, through the use of a galvonometer,
calculating the distance between the nerve end to be stimulated and the
muscular contraction that was observed, the time measuring the traversal of the
nerve current. He found that the impulse took between 0.0014 and 0.0020
seconds, which meant that the speed of the conduction was between 25 and 43
meters per second. As in frogs, so in man. If shock were collision, if stimulus
could be reduced to mechanical motion, then we could set up our speeds for the
present.

But was shock collision?

It was at this point that we can locate as an
event in both science and literature an essay written by a Russian
physiologist, Ivan Sechenov, entitled Reflex Actions of the Brain (1863). It
was an essay that drew conclusions from clinical and laboratory work to evoke a
certain paradigm for working with the mental.They key was the reflex:

“Thus all the exterior manifestations of
cerebral activity are reduced to muscular movements. This very much simplifies
the question. In fact, an almost infinite multitude of phenomena are reduced to
the combined play of some tens of muscles… Furthermore, the reader may
immediately perceive that all qualities appertaining to exterior manifestations
of cerebral activity: animation, passion, mockery, sadness, joy, etc. are of a
mechanical origin. The most rigid spiritualist is obliged to agree. Besides,
could it be otherwise when we know that the stone comes to life under the hand
of the sculptor and that that of the musician pulls out from an inert
instrument sounds that are full of life and passion? Thus the hand of these
artists being only apt to produce purely mechanical movements, how could it in
turn introduce in the sounds and forms a passionate expression, if it were not
in its turn a purely mechanical act? After what we have said, do you not feel,
dear reader, that a moment must come when we can analyse the exterior
manifestations of cerebral activity as easily as the physician today analyses a
musical accord or the phenomena given by a falling body?” [My translation of
the French translation]

It was this address to the reader that
strained the Russian censor’s tolerance. The essay in which Sechenev was not
originally meant to be published in a medical journal. It was meant to be
published in a literary one, The Contemporary, edited by one of the famous
names in Russia’s politico-literary history: Chernyshevsky.

By the time The Contemporary was banned,
Chernyshevsky was already in prison. It was in prison that Chernyshevsky wrote
What is to be Done, featuring a materialist physiologist based on Sechenov. And
in one of those reflex arcs that are called “response” or “influence” in
literary criticism and intellectual history, Chernyshevsky’s book called forth
another book, Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Mousehole.

It is hard to read Sechenov’s essay without
seeing the shadow retrospectively cast across it by Dostoevsky. For instance, this is how
Sechenov makes the point that what we call habit is a matter of muscular
movement:

“Fearing to multiply examples, I will limit
myself to asking my readers: is there anything in the world that is so
repugnant, so horrible, that man cannot get used to it? Each will doubtlessly
respond that there isn’t. And yet each knows that, in order to get used to many
things, one needs to make long and painful efforts. To get used to odious or
repugnant things isn’t about supporting them without effort (to claim this
would be absurd), it is about directing one’s effort skillfully.” (19)

Yet, this flash of the real vileness of life
has a scientific purpose. Sechenov was, if not the sole discoverer, the great
purveyor of the idea of inhibition. In this sense, Sechenov closes out a period
in which shock, whether as something vital or as mechanical motion, had a
simple relationship to the body electric of man.

“Twenty years ago, physiologists still
believed that the excitation of every nerve attached to a muscle led infallibly
to a contraction of the latter. And then Eduard Weber demonstrated, by the aid
of irrefutable experiments, that the excitation of the nerve wave which, by
certain of its ramifications, arrives at the heart not only does not augment
the activity of the latter organ, but even paralyzes it.”

After listing other discoveries in this vein,
Sechenov writes a sentence that is heavy with the future: “In the presence of
these facts, the idea has gained, little by little, credit withcontemporary physiologists that nervous
influences can exist in the animal body having for result to moderate or even
arrest involuntary movements.”

In other words, there exists inhibition. The
shadow side of shock, numbness, has a physiological correlate. And it is from
numbness, from inhibition, that we can build out, precariously, the spiritual
world beyond the muscle:

“Knowing all these facts, can contemporary
physiologists refuse to admit in the human body –and notably in the brain,
since the will only operates by the intermediary of that organ –the existence
of mechanisms that arrest reflex movement?” (22)

The complexity added by inhibition to the
reflex picture is then compounded with another feature of animal life: the
natural exaggeration to which the animal is carried by sudden circumstances,
emergencies, fears. Sechenov lists them, including stories of the sudden
incredible strength of the weak in emergencies, the fleetfootedness of
asthmatics in panic, and various Plinian stories of animal feats. All of which
does not bring us outside the mechanical – one can devise machines that also
perform non-linearly. However, it does bring us outside the predictable. To
find a place for inhibition and exaggeration in our animal life, Sechenov considers
that there is such a thing as unconscious reflex action.

“Thus, the operations which produce an
accumulation of the final energy of reflex action take place in the cerebral
hemispheres. There is two ways to explain the fact: the mechanism in question
could itself be organized on the plan of the reflector, and thus its central
partmust serve as a point of junction between sensitive and motor nerves; or
one could consider it as an appendix to the reflector, producing unconscious
reflex actions. This second conjecture is infinitely more probable than the
first…”

Shock leads us here, to a point where
numbness, inhibition, and the unconscious meet. The experimental data for this
will come not simply from the beheaded frogs and trepanned cats of the laboratory,
but from men and women – in train wrecks, entangled in factory machinery, under
bombardment. The shocks produced by the industrial experience will carry the
unconscious reflex action into the court room, make it a matter for insurance
adjustors as well as doctors, lawyers as well as researchers, and create a
massive trace that will be felt by the agents of circulation as well as the
working class.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.